Spray booths are used in vehicle collision repair facilities to provide a distinct area to paint vehicles undergoing collision repair. The spray booth provides a generally enclosed area to protect the vehicle being painted from debris from the surrounding environment and to contain paint overspray and other particulate debris from the preparation or painting processes from diffusing throughout the facility.
Paint spray booths generally include distinct areas within the confines of the outer walls to carry out different steps of the preparing and painting processes. For example, paint spray booths typically include distinct areas that are devoted to priming, filling and painting the vehicle being repaired. The vehicle is advanced sequentially through these distinct areas until the painting process is complete.
In many instances, there are damaged parts of the vehicle that must be removed and repaired, or otherwise entirely replaced, during the vehicle collision repair process. In either scenario, both the parts that remain attached to the vehicle and parts that have been removed must be painted. In current paint spray booths used in the vehicle collision repair industry, there is only a single prescribed painting zone located within the spray booth. Therefore, it is common to paint parts that have been removed from the vehicle in an area remote from the single prescribed painting zone of paint spray booth or to remove the painted vehicle from the spray booth after painting and position the removed parts from the painted vehicle into the single prescribed painting zone that was previously occupied by the painted vehicle for painting. Both of these traditional processes essentially double the time to complete the overall painting and drying stages of the vehicle collision repair process and is disruptive to the flow of product throughout the collision repair process.